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The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Matthew Harris, Bain Capital Ventures
No. 3 Matthew Harris, Managing Director, Bain Capital Ventures


Until recently, Matthew Harris hated “fintech.” Before the term was embraced as representing a hot sectoral trend, it was merely shorthand for the universe of vendors selling technology to financial companies. “The next ten years are going to be characterized by a grinding down of the cost bases of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley,” says Harris, 42, who heads the New York office of Boston-based Bain Capital Ventures. “That’s not a good space to be a vendor.” For Harris, who early in his career worked on private equity deals for Mitt Romney at BCV parent Bain Capital, after graduating from Williams College in 1994 with a BA in political economy, the much more exciting opportunity is in what he calls finsurgents — companies like business lender OnDeck Capital that use technology to compete with incumbent institutions. Harris invested in New York–based OnDeck in 2006 through Village Ventures, an early-stage firm he had co-founded in 2000 with Williams classmate Bo Peabody. Harris’s more than a dozen investments there included TxVia, a mobile payments platform that Google acquired in 2012, and digital banking pioneer Simple, which Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria bought last year. “For me, at a small firm, even with a good personal brand, it was increasingly feeling like I was at a disadvantage, so I decided to come back to Bain [in 2012] and build the fintech practice within the venture arm,” Harris explains. BCV manages $3 billion of committed capital and has 24 investment professionals, five of them on the fintech team. Harris, who has invested $250 million over the past three years in companies like AvidXchange (commercial payments automation) and Digital Currency Group (see Barry Silbert, No. 13), enjoys the flexibility he has at Bain: “I can get interested in and back the best entrepreneur, whether it’s a woman just starting or a guy who’s got a $100 million company.”
![]() 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners ![]() 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures ![]() 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners ![]() 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic |
![]() 6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital ![]() 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group ![]() 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group ![]() 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital ![]() 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners |
![]() 11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City ![]() 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz ![]() 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group ![]() 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria ![]() 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures |
![]() 16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures ![]() 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures ![]() 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund ![]() 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners ![]() 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation |
![]() 21. Michael Schlein Accion International ![]() 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates ![]() 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures ![]() 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management ![]() 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA |
![]() 26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT ![]() 27. Derek White Barclays ![]() 28. Alex Batlin UBS ![]() 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners ![]() 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings |
![]() 31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech ![]() 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta ![]() 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures ![]() 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance ![]() 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong |